Joe Shoen

speaker

611 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Joe Shoen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Well, my father ended up in the Navy during World War II, and he was stationed in Corona, California.

So when the European theater shut down and we declared victory there, they started letting people go home.

So in June, before the Pacific War was resolved, he was released, and my mother and him, she lived in a little trailer.

They had an infant son, and now they needed to get back to basically the Portland, Oregon area where they lived.

So they had a 44 two-door.

And so they could only take a certain amount of stuff and they ended up

even though they didn't have a lot of possessions, they gave things away because they couldn't go.

So my father observed that they were renting trailers in downtown Los Angeles.

So he went to Los Angeles and tried to rent a trailer.

They would not rent him one to take to Oregon.

They would just rent it around Los Angeles and bring it back to the same location.

So they both thought about that.

And then they started driving home and they had, that time it probably took them four or five days to make that trip.

And they'd been in business before the war.

in the barber and beauty salon business.

So they both were kind of business oriented.

So they talked about it all the way home, how many people had the same problem they had, which is they couldn't get home.

And basically the day they got there, they went into business.

They had, neither one ever remembers who came up with the name U-Haul.

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